The present invention is directed to computer systems, and more particularly, to computer-implemented interfaces and tools for handling compensation-related queries.
Employee compensation, including both salary and non-salary components such as benefits, typically form a substantial portion of an enterprise's business costs. In an effort to improve profitability, there is a natural tendency for corporations to attempt to limit their compensation-related costs as much as possible. As a result of advancing technologies (such as the ability to quickly access information required to perform a given task from virtually anywhere in the world using the Internet) and a reduction in international trade barriers, it has also become possible to outsource a number of work functions from advanced economies to cheaper economies overseas. The possibility of outsourcing further tends to reduce growth in salaries and other forms of compensation for many types of jobs in advanced economies. At the same time, workers are naturally interested in increasing their income and benefits as much as possible, and corporations desirous of hiring and retaining good employees must ensure that they provide adequate levels of compensation.
Compensation-related negotiations between employees and corporate managers, e.g., during annual reviews for existing employees or during the pre-hiring process for prospective employees, are therefore often crucial in determining the employees' financial status. Neither side in the negotiations has traditionally had the benefit of as much reliable compensation-related information as they would probably prefer: for example, for obvious competitive reasons, most corporations restrict access to their compensation packages as much as possible, so neither a hiring manager for company X nor a prospective employee of company X may be aware of the exact salaries for similar jobs at company Y. Unfortunately from the point of view of employees, traditionally it is the corporate managers who have the advantage when it comes to possessing at least some realistic compensation data—for example, a hiring manager negotiating a salary with a prospective employee of a corporation may at least know the salary ranges for relevant job categories at that corporation, the actual growth in salaries from year to year within the corporation, and so on. The employee or prospective employee typically has relatively limited compensation-related information available (such as hearsay information obtained from friends or from surveys that are known to be unreliable), and is thus often unable to negotiate from as strong a position as his/her management counterpart. An employee's ability to optimize his/her compensation package, and hence their financial status, may be considerably enhanced if reliable compensation-related information were made easily accessible.